ICEE Announces Business-Academic Outreach Partnership

Professors from five universities will head up a new ICEE Task Force to prepare business management and academics worldwide for new ISO Annex SL requirements and Enterprise Engagement practices, which are now required in 60 ISO standards and by investors with over $15.7 trillion in investment capital. The first conference will be held Oct. 3-4, 2018, at the University of Texas at Arlington, 20 minutes from DFW Airport. Click here for more information.

The International Center for Enterprise Engagement (ICEE) has announced the creation of a formal Business-Academic Task Force to support the field of Enterprise Engagement at the professional and academic level. Explains Dr. Ron McKinley, co-founder of ICEE and Chief Standards Officer for the Healthcare Management Institute (HMI) at the University of Texas Medical Branch: “The task force’s short-term goal is to implement a plan to educate business management on the practices they will need to comply with ISO Annex SL management systems and to address shareholder pressures for Human Capital disclosures. The longer-term goal is to establish a formal field that prepares business management for the skills they will need to run or be part of today’s successful organizations. We believe that the time has arrived for the creation of a formal field of Enterprise Engagement taught not only in professional development courses but at the academic level as a requirement in business and administration programs.”

Adds McKinley: “The main reason to comply with these standards is to take advantage of the significant benefits in terms of financial performance, a better experience for all stakeholders, a more sustainable growth model and achieving better results from your engagement investments.”

The Annex SL standards are now required in ISO 9001 Quality Management, ISO 45001 Occupational Safety and Health and 58 other standards, “all of which now specify CEO-led responsibility for a Human Capital management and Enterprise Engagement plan and system that connects the dots between all interested parties (employees, customers, distribution partners, vendors, communities, government and investors,) and all related tactics, such as leadership recruitment and development, assessment, communications, learning, innovation, community, rewards and recognition, analytics, and more,” explains Lee S. Webster, co-founder of ICEE and Director of Standards at HMI. “To understand Annex SL, you can use the Quality Management field as an example. The ISO standards took a variety of different processes and put them together in a system that could be audited and continuously improved, only they left out the people aspect. Annex SL fills in that gap by providing a similar framework for managing all the people associated with the enterprise and the successful implementation of the standard.”

Many Companies at Risk of Losing Certification

McKinley stresses that “There potentially could be millions of CEOs right now at companies around the world with ISO certifications who simply don’t know about these critical requirements, and yet they have only three years to comply. The risk to these companies is that they’ll lose their ISO certifications, or that their certification will be meaningless, because they fail to comply with what is now considered an essential element of any ISO management system standard.”

What’s of greatest concern,” notes McKinley, “is that very few people know about these new requirements, and they’re not going to go away. ISO has been very clear that Annex SL is essential. Companies were given a chance to show good faith in their audits this time around, but next time they won’t have a choice. Otherwise, the entire value of a company’s certification is thrown into question.” In some cases, this can affect the organization in cases of litigation. “A failure to comply with a fundamental element of a standard certainly jeopardizes whatever legal cover such compliance might provide,” McKinley points out, adding that “Anyone in an organization who knows about this and doesn’t inform the CEO is doing the company a great disservice.”

Explains Dr. Sharon Floyd, Associate Dean at Brandman University in San Diego: “As someone who comes to the academic world with nearly 35 years of corporate experience, I believe the principles of Annex SL and Enterprise Engagement should be a requirement in any business or MBA program, certainly as a course, and perhaps as a group of courses or even a degree.”

The reason, adds Dr. Randy McNamey, Professor of Human Resources at Tarleton State University, is that “We are now seeing signs that corporations are putting executives in charge of linking the customer and employee experience, which is yet another sign the time for this field has arrived.” (see ESM: Shefit Exec Joins March to Merger of Employee and Customer Engagement).

Does your company comply with Annex SL? Webster offers this response: “The CEO at any company following any one of 60 standards will have to be able to demonstrate in its next audit a formal Human Capital and Enterprise Engagement strategy with a strategic and tactical plan carried out through all levels of management. While Annex SL provides tremendous leeway as to how to implement such a system, it must demonstrate that it is driven by the CEO, strategically and tactically connects the dots between the interested parties, and describes the tools the organization uses to engage them in a measurable way.”

McKinley and other Task Force members concur that there are a lot of ISO and public companies that don’t follow the standards, either in spirit or practice. To find out if that’s the case in your company, Webster suggests this: “Simply ask yourself some basic questions about your company: Does the organization have a culture and values that supports objectives that many stakeholders would be able to explain if asked? Does it have a formal CEO-driven Human Capital and Enterprise Engagement plan to engage all stakeholders, including customers, distribution partners, employees, vendors, and communities? Does the tactical plan connect all the managers in the different parts of the organizations in some systematic way so that the communications, learning, innovation, rewards and recognition, and measurements are all aligned with objectives and values? The Annex SL standards leave a lot of room for creativity, but the CEO is responsible for an auditable strategic and tactical plan. Any hopes that this will go away are unfounded. We don’t think many companies could meet that standard today, and they’ve got three years to do it.”

A Business-Academic Road Show on Enterprise Engagement

According to the Task Force statement, the business-academic outreach effort will consist of:

1.An Enterprise Engagement education programs at universities, starting in Oct. Of this year at the University of Texas, Arlington, Oct. 3-4, specifically designed to:

•Prepare educators, academics and business professionals for the training and implementation practices required by Annex SL standards and Enterprise Engagement principles and to create the foundation for both professional education and a course to be required in business, administration and related courses.

•Educate business leaders involved with participating universities, along with leaders in their communities, on this critical new field and help universities build a professional development program and an academic track to address this pressing need for new management skills.

This event will be promoted by local radio and business advertising in conjunction with the participating university.

2.ICEE-EEA eBooks distributed through EEA’s RRN Portal at RewardsRecognitionNetwork.com and ESM Portal at EnterpriseEngagement.org, through partner universities, the Academy of Management community, the Enterprise Engagement Academy at EEA.tmlu.org, and through the EEA’s sponsor communities.

•Enterprise Engagement, Annex ISO and ISO 10018: What CEO’s Need to Know to Comply, with information on resources and solution-providers in all key areas of engagement, viewed each month throughout the year by over 20,000 business professionals via e-mail and website searches.

ICEE was formed at the University of Texas Medical Branch in 2017 to create a formal certification program for ISO 10018, which in effect enables companies that follow Annex SL to both improve the results and gain an additional designation for their commitment to Quality People Management. Under the current circumstances, companies that go through the additional investment of instituting Annex SL do not achieve any marketing benefit for doing so. Our goal is to make sure that all ISO compliant companies benefit from the efficiencies, improvements in performance and better stakeholder experience of having an Enterprise Engagement strategy, and also from the marketing benefits of telling both customers and investors about their commitment to success through people.

A crash course on how to apply Enterprise Engagement to everyday organizational goals and to profit from new ISO Annex SL and ISO 10018 standards and certification. Click here for more information and to register.

The first and most comprehensive book on Enterprise Engagement and the new ISO 9001 and ISO 10018 quality people management standards.

Online: The Enterprise Engagement Academy at EEA.tmlu.org, providing the only formal training on Enterprise Engagement and the new ISO 9001 and ISO 10018 quality people management standards. Provides preparation for professionals to support organizations seeking ISO 10018 employer or solution provider certification, as well as elective courses on Trade Show Engagement, Rewards and Recognition, Government, and other topics.

Services: The International Center for Enterprise Engagement at TheICEE.org, offering: ISO 10018 certification for employers, solution providers, and Enterprise Engagement technology platforms; Human Resources and Human Capital audits for organizations seeking to benchmark their practices and related Advisory services for the hospitality field.

The Engagement Agency at EngagementAgency.net, offering: complete support services for employers, solution providers, and technology firms seeking to profit from formal engagement practices for themselves or their clients, including Brand and Capability audits for solution providers to make sure their products and services are up to date.

Enterprise Engagement Benchmark Tools: The Enterprise Engagement Alliance offers three tools to help organizations profit from Engagement. Click here to access the tools.

• ROI of Engagement Calculator. Use this tool to determine the potential return-on-investment of an engagement strategy.